Danese Cooper

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Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is an advocate of open-source software. She is on the board of the Open Source Initiative. She came to public attention for her work at Sun Microsystems on promoting open source, and presently works at Intel.

Her father named her after his Alfa Romeo. In her twenties, Cooper was in the Peace Corps and involved in management of the Renaissance Faire in California. She worked on the Options Trading Floor at the Pacific Exchange, leading to work in a prominent law firm. She then moved to Apple Computer, the first of several jobs in engineering. She worked for six months at Microsoft.

Her job before Sun was at Symantec, working on version 5 of the ACT! personal information manager (ACT! 2000). This was her first practical experience of internally open development methods and Extreme Programming and convinced her of the benefits of open source and open development.

She joined the Open Source Initiative board in December 2001.

At Sun, Cooper created and managed the Open Source Programs Office at Sun from March 1999 until March 2005. She chose the Sun Public License for NetBeans software, helped draft the CDDL for OpenSolaris and worked on the creation of the Sun Industry Standards Source License for TI-RPC, the Joint Copyright Assignment for OpenOffice.org and that program's dual-licensing with the LGPL. She received a Chairman's Award at Sun as part of the team creating the Sun blogspaces: blogs.sun.com and java.net.

She ended her employment at Sun in March 2005 and presently works for Intel.

Ms. Cooper is also a long-time follower of Meher Baba